Zero history

80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

Look,” said Fiona, “it’s you.”

Garreth had ordered her aloft again. Now she showed Milgrim her iPhone, the camo tarp rustling around them.

“That’s Ajay?” Two figures on the little screen, from a high angle, steel-engraved in washed-out green. One of them shuffling, dejected, head down, shoulders too wide for Milgrim’s jacket. The other man was short, broad, something round and flat on his head. Ajay’s hands were together, crossed, just above crotch-level, in what looked like a gesture of modesty. Handcuffed.

Fiona swung down, hovered, catching them as they passed, into and out of frame. Milgrim thought Ajay was doing a good job of conveying abject surrender, but otherwise he didn’t see the resemblance. Chandra seemed to have done a better job with the spray-on hair this time.

The other man, Milgrim thought, looked as if someone had subjected the Dalai Lama to the gravity of a planet with greater mass than Earth’s. Short, extremely sturdy, age-indeterminate, he wore a sort of beret, level across his forehead, with a pom-pom on top.

As the subjects left her frame, Fiona’s thumbs moved, whirling the point of view back up, reminding Milgrim to check his own iPhone, where he found his penguin looking at grass and low bushes.

When he glanced back, Fiona had found three more figures, approaching on the Scrubs.

One was Chombo, still furled in his tissue-thin coat, and looking much more convincingly unhappy than Ajay’s Milgrim. To Chombo’s left came Foley, limping visibly, wearing darker pants than the ones that had elicited his nickname. He still had his cap, though, and the short dark jacket he’d worn in Paris. On Chombo’s right, Milgrim saw, to his horror, was the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, Winnie’s other Mike, the one with the mullet and the knife in his Toters.

“He wants you over here,” Fiona said, meaning where her drone was, “looking for the one I lost. Move.”

Milgrim sank his concentration into the bright little rectangle, penguin-space, his thumbs tapping. He rolled, corrected for it, swam higher in the air.

Fiona’s drone’s night vision was so much better than the penguin’s. The penguin’s suffered from a kind of infrared myopia; the darker it was, the closer he had to get, and the brighter he had to make the penguin’s infrared LEDs. Which were none too bright to begin with, according to Fiona. The grass below presented in a sort of cheesy pointillism, monochrome, faintly green, stripped of detail. Though if anyone were there, he thought, he’d see them.

And then he found Chombo, and Foley, and the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, still walking.

He had the penguin on auto-swim. He took over, stilled the wings, and let momentum carry him out in the gentle arc provided by his adjustment of the tail, something he was already better at.

Over something in the grass.

A hole? A large rock? He tried to slow himself, using the wings in reverse, but this caused him to roll, catching a blank screen of light-pollution. He righted himself. Nothing below. He began to swim down, using the wings on manual.

A man sat on the grass, cross-legged, something rectangular on his lap. A dark coat, short pale hair. Then gone, the penguin, in spite of Milgrim’s best efforts, having overshot, glided on.

Fiona had told him, twice, how lucky they were to have no breeze tonight, all calm in the Thames Valley, yet he couldn’t steer the penguin well enough to see a man somewhere immediately below him. He took a deep breath, lifted his thumbs from the screen. Let things settle. Let the penguin become a simple balloon, up in the windless air. Then start again.

“Twenty feet off site,” he heard Fiona say, very quietly, “and closing.”